Pregnant Women Never Drink Alone (Part 1).
Each year, as many as 40,000 babies are born with one or more of these four disorders, at a cost of over $4 billion dollars nationwide”. One reason for this isthat in addition to its shared diagnoses with the other categories listed, FAS also incorporates diagnoses of foetal alcohol growth defects. In 1957, Rouquette on the same page submitted a doctoral dissertation in Medicine at the University of Paris entitled, “Influence of Parental Alcoholic Toxiomania on the Physical and Psychic Development of Young Children”. A decade later, the research of Dr. P. Lemoine,
and other team researchers, reinforced and extended the conclusions of Rouquette by demonstrating that alcohol pregnancy clearly increases the rates of still birth, along with two new categories of adverse consequences, namely, growth deficiency, and malformations among the children of alcoholic women.
It is the subsequent pattern and irregularities in the child’s growth, coupled with noticeable disruptions of functions of the child’s central nervous system that betrays the presence of FAS. In addition to low birth rate, infants with FAS commonly exhibit a smaller head circumference outside the range of the normal, and display bouts of hyper-excitability often leading to epileptic convulsions. Children with FAS are typically tiny with little fat developed under the skin, diminished muscular development and general muscular weakness. Malformations of the optic disk of the eye are common, with many children suffering a moderate or severe reduction
in visual sharpness. Similarly, partial deafness is another symptom.
Women Health Open J. 2017; 3(3): e6-e9. doi: 10.17140/WHOJ-3-e009
